glorianna will be discussing the topic of "memorex and the sense of self" at the evocative objects lunch, organized by the MIT initiative on technology and self.
the lunch takes place in MIT, building e51-275 from 12 - 2pm.

talk abstract ::
what if, one day as you are rummaging around some boxes left you by your parents, you find an old format video tape? what would you imagine about the contents of the tape? would it be important for you to find a way to play it? if the tape contained moments relevant to your life, what processes might be called up to incorporate these moments into your sense of self? in this session, we explore memorex and its potential impact on the sense of self.

our own ali mazalek's tangible viewpoints (mazalek, ishii, davenport) received an honorable mention in the john lansdown prize for multimedia competition. the award was announced at the closing ceremony of the eurographics conference last friday. for more information on this project, see ::
http://web.media.mit.edu/~mazalek/projects/tvpts.

Clean Flicks is a company that edits all the sex, violence and profanity out of feature films and then sells the clean cut for profit. They are suing a long list of directors for infringement on their first amendment rights. Clean Flicks clients have the first amendment right to watch Taxi Driver sans the "f" word.

Essentially they are suing for the right to re-edit. They claim no copyright infringement because copyrights include "fair use" of materials, such as making and watching a personal version.

This brings up two questions:
Who owns the edit?
When does repurposed content become ownerless?

Will they win? probably not...

just wanted to wish james all the best with his move to the aesthetics and computation group. he will be sorely missed around the IC quarters, but hey - he's only gone to the other side of the building, so i'm sure we'll see plenty of him. go james - you rock!